Woods was hugging, high-fiving and generally behaving like any old 18- handicapper. Plunkett, the Heisman Trophy winner and Rose Bowl champion, needed only an order of nachos to complete the picture of a rabid fan. And ex- provost Rice, a few days removed from being designated America's national security adviser, looked ready to climb a ladder and cut down the nets to honor her beloved Cardinal.

President Trump addresses nation after mass shooting at Florida SchoolWhite House

Stanford had just knocked off top-ranked Duke in yet another defining moment for the school's athletic program, and the movers were shaking. But the most significant figure of all on that Thursday night in December sat anonymously next to the school's athletic director, his sunken eyes, sweater vest and low-key demeanor belying his stature: John Arrillaga -- the self-made billionaire and the man more responsible than perhaps any other single person for constructing, literally and figuratively, the nation's preeminent college athletic program.

"He's been the patron saint of Stanford athletics," says Duncan Matteson, a member of the school's athletic board.

Arrillaga is not your stereotypical, out-of-control booster. He is not the guy who wants to hire or fire the football coach, nor is he the shady figure supplying cash, cars or other inducements to a hot recruit. He is not in the business of supplying a "job" to put some extra cash in the pocket of the financially strapped quarterback, nor is he inclined to grease the palm of a professor to pump up the grade of the failing point guard.

That said, the 63-year-old Arrillaga wields considerable power in Palo Alto,

the kind that gives him access to just about anyone on campus. The kind that generates a weekly dinner engagement at the president's house; that leads the assistant athletic director in charge of facilities to place Arrillaga's phone number on speed dial; that lets him pursue pet causes like the elimination of all advertising signage in the football stadium and the basketball arena.

It's the kind of power that stems from, among other things, creating the Arrillaga Family Fund, a Stanford sports endowment now estimated to be worth in excess of $25 million, according to a source familiar with the athletic department.

Arrillaga's largesse, while dating back to the '60s, has spiked over the course of the past decade. And over that period, the school's sports have soared. More than boasting the nation's top-ranked basketball team and a football squad that recently ended a nearly three-decade Rose Bowl drought, Stanford has won six consecutive Sears Directors' Cup trophies -- awarded to the nation's most successful athletic program -- under the stewardship of athletic director Ted Leland.

And, says one former employee, "Ted owes his legacy to John."

MAN BEHIND THE SCENES

While Arrillaga, a standout basketball player at Stanford in the late '50s, has shown little if any interest in influencing personnel decisions, he has become Leland's silent partner. Silent in that he never speaks with the media - - he declined interview requests for this story -- and in that he shuns any recognition for his patronage.

Leland and others who know Arrillaga say it took serious arm-twisting to get him to permit even his family name to be attached to the $22 million sports center he helped build for the athletic department in the early '90s. And many of those with knowledge of the inner-workings of the program say Arrillaga has been the anonymous donor on countless projects.

"There are a lot of things that have happened at Stanford University that John Arrillaga did that nobody will ever know," says Andy Geiger, the school's athletic director from 1979-90 before taking the same job at Ohio State.

Even so, the name resonates loudly around campus, particularly in athletics.

Paul Wiggin, the former Stanford football coach who has known Arrillaga since the two were college classmates, says, "I don't know where Stanford University would be without John Arrillaga."

Says Sparks: "He has a lot of influence. Everybody who works in the department knows that he is The Man."

The Santa Clara-based real estate magnate has acquired his powerful presence both through his considerable financial contributions and an excessive -- some would say obsessive -- hands-on approach to facilities.

By playing a considerable role, financially and/or physically, in every piece of the more than $80 million worth of construction for athletics over the past decade, Arrillaga is the department's de facto facilities maven.

He's the master builder who regularly inspects the premises, whose attention to cleanliness and detail on the Stanford grounds has run the gamut from insuring that papers are not affixed on office windows to deciding the color of paint to be used on the new diving tower. He has been known to hop into a dumpster during construction because the debris wasn't being loaded correctly or to go so far as to examine the bathrooms to ensure the janitorial staff is up to snuff.

"There's certainly a tip-toeing that goes on because people don't want to upset the golden goose," says a Stanford insider, who, like several people interviewed for this story, requested anonymity out of respect for Arrillaga's privacy and/or his power.

Says Tom Beckett, an associate athletic director at Stanford from 1983-1994 and now Yale's athletic director: "I just know that anytime John got involved in a project, we made sure we got out of his way. And he'd ask for that if we didn't."

Even Leland knows he has to watch his step. The athletic director was walking around campus one day with Arrillaga and Ray Purpur, the department's facilities and operations chief, when Arrillaga abruptly announced he had to leave.

"So Purpur and I start walking down the pathway and we walk about 20 steps, and there's a paper bag there," says Leland, whose on-campus home Arrillaga helped build. "I said to Ray, 'We better pick this up.' And Ray said, 'I bet John put it there just to test us to see if we'll pick it up.' And we turn around and there he is watching us. So we picked it up and threw it in the trash."

Leland told this story with a laugh and not with a hint of resentment, fully aware that in the past decade Stanford's facilities have gone from among the worst in the Pac-10 to arguably the best. Not the biggest, but certainly the most well-groomed and tended, the grounds and facilities are a testament to Arrillaga's involvement as a benefactor, a landscaper and a neat freak.

And, like more traditional boosters, he has made his wealth available to help Stanford keep some of its more sought-after coaches from being looted by other schools.

"There are any number of private and individual commitments he has made to people to retain their services at the university against pretty strong contacts from other schools," says 49ers general manager Bill Walsh, a close friend of Arrillaga's and twice the head football coach at Stanford. "Home loans, any number of things that are above board, strictly legal NCAA-wise."

A MAN OF ACTION

Arrillaga apparently has never been a man to endure bureaucracy, and so he has been known to pull a few end-arounds over the years to get things done. More than once he has ordered coaches to clean out their offices and/or locker rooms on a Friday, then brought in a crew over the weekend to remodel the premises.

He pulled that trick back when Wiggin became the head football coach in 1980. Arrillaga wanted to redo the shabby offices but university funds were tied up in red tape.

"They said they couldn't direct the money (he was donating)," Wiggin says. "So he gutted the building and said, 'Now tell me if you can direct the money. ' If John Arrillaga wants yes, there's no such thing as no. That's how powerful he is. And yet he doesn't wear that. You just know that."

All the while, Geiger was running interference, trying to help get the work done but also trying to placate the higher-ups.

"I was playing two roles, trying to get the project done and to keep a lid on it," Geiger says. "We hadn't gone through very many of the procedures we should go through in order to get this done, code requirements, building permits. So we were kind of playing hide-and-seek with the authorities there for a while.

"We got yelled at and got it done. The president of the university told me, 'If I'd been in your position, knowing what you were dealing with, I'd have done exactly what you did. But don't ever do it again.' "

Arrillaga's most dramatic and visible contribution to the athletic program is the Arrillaga Family Sports Center, home to the administrative and coaches offices, the football locker room, a sports medicine center and a 16,000- square-foot weight room and a conference center. In an unusual architectural choice, at the center of the two-story building is a practice basketball court,

surrounded by glass for optimal viewing while walking from one office to the next.

"I always joke with recruits that if John Arrillaga had been a swimmer, there would be a swimming pool in the middle of the building," says Stanford defensive line coach/recruiting coordinator Dave Tipton.

Arrillaga's relationship with Stanford began during his undergraduate days there as a scholarship basketball player. He came to Palo Alto from modest means, his Basque parents having immigrated from Spain and his father earning a living as a grocery wholesaler in Southern California.

At the time Arrillaga attended Stanford, there were no free rides; scholarships merely helped offset costs, and so Arrillaga went to work on his money-making skills. He took on a string of odd jobs, delivering student mail, working at the Peninsula Creamery, landscaping for the school's public-works department, hawking a health supplement.

"He was a very enterprising guy," says Dr. Sid Garber, who was the president of Arrillaga's fraternity, Delta Tau Delta. "He came from meager means and was always trying to make a buck. I remember him selling some kind of vitamin deal. I thought that sounded like a good idea, so I also tried it and I think I sold like two, one to my mom and one to my dad. He showed he was a good salesman, he was out there peddling those things."

ATHLETIC PIT BULL

Arrillaga also excelled as an athlete. A bout with mononucleosis set him back a year, but he wound up a three-year starter from 1957 through 1960 for coach Howie Dallmar. A pure shooter, Arrillaga averaged 12.2 points a game during his career, and his 14.2-point average in his senior season earned him third-team All-America status and a spot on the all-conference first team.

"As an athlete, you would probably describe him as a pit bull," says Wiggin,

who says he and Arrillaga would have at each other in various sporting competitions, highlighted by some intense one-on-one basketball showdowns. "He would do anything he could to win. He was relentlessly competitive."

Not long after he finished at Stanford, Arrillaga went to work as a broker at the industrial real-estate firm Renault & Handley in Palo Alto. He immediately showed an interest not only in selling and leasing but in the buildings themselves, and his love of landscaping also became a part of his career.

"He amazed me one time for a broker," says George McKee, who worked with Arrillaga at Renault & Handley. "He had a listing once in Sunnyvale and he brought me down and showed me this building. He was the broker and he had done the landscaping himself."

Arrillaga eventually formed a partnership with Dick Peery, and the pair would become Northern California real-estate barons over the course of the next three decades. They bought up cheap land in Silicon Valley, constructed versatile buildings at low cost and kept debt to a minimum, and when the area exploded, they reaped the benefits.

In the business world -- and at Stanford, for that matter -- Arrillaga became viewed as the ultimate people person, an unparalleled salesman with unending attention to detail. Mainly, a man in command.

"He doesn't want to be part of anything where he can't make the decision," says a Stanford insider who has known Arrillaga for years.

In Forbes magazine's most recent assessment of the nation's 400 wealthiest people, Arrillaga was tied with several others at No. 189, with an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion -- but several people close to him say that figure is considerably low.

"They have no idea. He's at the top or one of the top in the entire country, " says Walsh, presumably embellishing a bit given Bill Gates' estimated worth of $63 billion puts him atop the heap, ahead of the $58 billion nest egg collected by Larry Ellison.

Arrillaga first appeared on the Forbes list in 1987, with a net worth estimated at $250 million; by 1996 the magazine was reporting $550 million and by '98 that figure had grown to $1.1 billion.

Nonetheless, even Arrillaga has been said to admit that his worth is undervalued. One friend says he was with Arrillaga more than a decade ago when Forbes called to check its figures, "and John said, 'Where are you guys getting all this information? I'm not worth anywhere near that. I wish I were worth half that.' Then he hung up and said, 'They're low by about $300 million. ' "

210-ACRE NIRVANA

One former member of the Stanford athletic department tells a tale of Arrillaga playing golf in San Diego, and one of his playing partners was an admiral from an aircraft carrier stationed nearby. At one point, the admiral mentioned the millions of dollars lost recently when one of the carrier's planes crashed. "So Mr. A. turned to him and said, 'I probably buy two or three of those for you every time I write my tax check.' "

Nothing, though, speaks to Arrillaga's wealth more than the 210-acre domain he has crafted over the past decade in the foothills just to the west of Stanford. There, he has taken an abandoned quarry and turned it into his own private nirvana -- "The Other Farm" -- an estate that speaks to both his passion for landscaping and his vast wealth.

"Cost is never a factor," Walsh said. "Ever."

Naturally, an invite to the estate is a precious commodity, although a Stanford connection will get you a long way. For example, Arrillaga hosts a barbecue for the school's freshman football players every year, and last year he held a gathering to honor the men's tennis team for winning the national championship.

Man-made lakes. Waterfalls. Tens of thousands of trees, planted in imported soil, each pampered by a drip system designed to spur their growth. Sixty to seventy miles of irrigation. A 40-car garage with a marble floor ("You've never seen so much marble in your life," says Chris Burford, the former Stanford receiver who lived in the same freshman dorm as Arrillaga in 1956 and was one of his fraternity brothers.) A basketball court. Tennis courts. A beach volleyball court, with sand trucked in from Monterey simply because he likes that particular sand so much. Putting greens. Outdoor pavilions. A boathouse. Music piped in to all corners. Roofing flown in from a village in the Mediterranean. Hundreds of pieces of work by bohemian San Francisco sculptor Benny Bufano. Carvings created by Arrillaga's own private force of stonemasons -- workers he imported from Czechoslovakia.

"There's nothing in the world like it. This is the very essence of John. His signature is on this," Walsh says.

Just as his signature is now all over the Stanford campus, from the two simple office buildings that were the first he built and donated to the school back in the '70s to the main athletic building that bears his family's name; from the more than $1 million renovation of Sunken Diamond a few years back to the recently opened $40 million alumni center named for his late wife, Fran, and for which he was the lead donor.

The fencing is everywhere, surrounding the football practice field, Maples Pavilion, the track and field area, the tennis facility, Stanford Stadium. Naturally, it's an Arrillaga touch, made of something called COR-TEN steel, which takes on a pastoral rust color after getting wet.

"He has, in his own way, physically defined all of the real estate that encompasses Stanford's athletic facilities with his rather unique, I don't want to call it fencing because it's more than fencing," says Ted Taube, whose family name is attached to the tennis facility. "You'd have a hard time driving through it with a U.S. Army tank, but the cost of this fencing is extravagant. I understand it's $100 a linear foot. It is indestructible, permanent, forever, and it's beautiful."

Arrillaga's influence, though, is far from limited to pure aesthetics. Initially, he directed the bulk of his help toward Dallmar's program, and, to this day, he remains very much a friend to basketball. Nonetheless, he has connections with several coaches at Stanford, and even back as far as Walsh's first stint (1977-78) he was said to be doling out stipends.

Walsh says that when he became head coach, Arrillaga gave him an "allowance" of "like $16,000" to be used for any needs in the football offices.

Walsh also says he presumed Arrillaga went to the coaches of the non-revenue sports and told them they had a $2,000 allowance for any upgrades they wanted to make.

Arrillaga also has shown interest in impacting not only material appearances, but philosophical ones as well. Last summer, Stanford announced its decision to eliminate all the advertising signage in its basketball arena and its football stadium -- a decision that would cost the athletic department an estimated $500,000-$700,000 annually.

The action was about three years in the making, says Dr. Gerhard Casper, the school president at the time. Casper says his concerns over commercialization arose independently of Arrillaga's similar concerns, and that the two of them "found ourselves as kind of kindred souls on this issue and reinforced one another in a way."

One source familiar with the athletic department says Arrillaga had insisted upon eliminating all commercial signage at the baseball complex when he did his $1 million-$1.5 million renovation in 1996, but Leland insists that Arrillaga didn't instigate the moves at Maples Pavilion and Stanford Stadium.

Several sources, though, say it was Arrillaga who forced the whole deal, and even Walsh says, "John ramrodded that. Gerhard might have agreed totally, but John didn't want any signs anywhere."

Asked if it were understood that Arrillaga would make up the financial losses, Walsh says, "Oh yeah, sure. He wouldn't hurt the university."

IN A LEAGUE OF HIS OWN

Whatever the case, it's clear that when Arrillaga talks, Leland and others listen, that although he is one of many substantial university donors, he's in a league of his own. And as commissioner of that league, he is afforded a certain level of authority not passed along to everyone else.

"There have been other alumni that have made relatively significant dollar contributions who, if they don't like their parking (spots for events), they have to struggle," says an insider. "Well, I don't think Mr. Arrillaga would have to struggle. In fact, if he didn't like the parking lot, he would have it changed."

To which Leland responds, "Well, you come down here everyday, you walk around the facilities like he does, and you care as much as he does, and I'll listen to you as much as I do him. And you know as much about what he's talking about as this guy does. I mean, this guy has got an incredible sense of ambience, and so in the facilities end, if he tells me we ought to paint a building purple, I'm gonna listen, because first of all, I know he cares more than anybody else does, and I think he may have better taste than anybody I've ever been around."

Arrillaga also might have more connections than anybody Leland has ever been around. The athletic department brought in approximately $26 million in gifts last year, and though Arrillaga's offering might have been "only" $3 million, his influence contributed considerably more to the pot.

It's understood that Arrillaga will call some of his wealthy pals on behalf of the university when there's work to be done -- the unwritten deal being that help for Arrillaga this time around will be worth help from Arrillaga down the road.

In the Stanford basketball media guide, a page is devoted to Leland that details the athletic department's many successes since his arrival in 1991: the 37 national championships -- including an NCAA-record six in 1996-97 and five the following year -- and the six consecutive Sears trophies.

Then the guide details the magic numbers: The $80 million for renovation and construction of facilities, the $125 million in private donations, the athletic department endowment that soared from $62 million to $205 million -- and now, in fact, is projected to reach nearly $400 million by the end of the year.